In English vernacular, the title of Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 epic about the Napoleonic wars does double metaphorical service. As the book is around 1,300 pages long, it has become shorthand for prolixity. Official reports – into Bloody Sunday or the Iraq war – are described by the press as being, for example, “three times longer than War and Peace”. And, because the novel’s bulk includes lengthy reflections on politics, philosophy and theology, it also serves as a standard of intellectual ambition. Critics indicting a writer for glibness or triviality will sniff that the volume on offer is “not exactly War and Peace”.

Its status as an exemplar of seriousness has long made the book attractive to cultural commissars wishing to emphasise their highbrow credentials. The old Soviet Union considered Tolstoy’s novel a work of such national importance that millions of state roubles backed Sergei Bondarchuk’s mid-60s movie version, which was reported to have sold 135m tickets at the time of its first release. As part of a Year of Literature, declared in 2015 in what is now the Russian Federation, a four-day continuous public reading of the book was broadcast live on television, radio and internet.

Audrey Hepburn as Natasha and Vitorio Gassman as Anatol in 1956. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount

More surprisingly, the US, even during the cold war, paid its respects to the text at the culture factories on both coasts. In Hollywood, the director King Vidor, having failed to win the best director Oscar on four previous occasions, went flat out for the golden trophy with his 1956 War and Peace, although it failed to reverse a losing streak that may have become more painful for the patriotic director when Bondarchuk’s Russian version subsequently took the Academy Award for best foreign language film. On Broadway, a 1960s condensation of the novel by the Scottish playwright Robert David MacDonald had two successful runs.

For British broadcasting, War and Peace has become a weapon in political conflicts. It is not an accident that 2016, a year in which the BBC must agree a new charter and licence fee settlement with the government, begins with a new War and Peace, adapted by Andrew Davies. This is a symbolic revisiting of one of the corporation’s most revered achievements of the past, an award-winning 1972 television production which itself was part of an attempt to bolster public confidence at a time when the corporation was emerging from an earlier fight for independence with government. And, if the BBC’s enemies in Westminster and the media are impressed by War and Peace, then they should be doubly swayed because it is just a year since the novel was also dramatised on Radio 4.

Where the latest BBC television War and Peace goes against convention is in its brevity. The 1972 version consisted of 20 episodes with a combined running time of almost 15 hours; Radio 4 allocated 10 hours of the schedules on a single day. The Vidor film runs for more than three hours, while the Bondarchuk is so long that it was originally released in four separate parts, giving it the feel more of a TV series than a work of cinema.

Whether knowingly or coincidentally, the BBC has gone for the Bondarchuk length for its new six-part television version. All dramatic adaptations involve a series of decisions about what to leave out, as even a novel of average length takes several hours to act out in full. Davies has admitted to cutting his Penguin Classics copy in half with a pair of kitchen scissors in order to make it a more manageable size.

Davies has been a key TV filleter of literature since turning RF Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days into a BBC1 peak-time hit in 1980, and it rapidly becomes apparent that his War and Peace is a work of intelligent reduction.

On a simple episode count, Davies may have lost to Jack Pulman, who scripted and directed the TV adaptation in 1972, but the later version benefits greatly from a quickening in dramatic pace. Almost incredibly to modern eyes, viewers 43 years ago were introduced to the story by watching servants laying a long banquet table more or less in real time.

In a culture nervous of the audience’s education and attention span, the latest adaptation begins with a series of white-on‑black captions summarising the military situation between Russia, Austria and France, before Stephen Rea’s Count Vasily strides across a courtyard and into a ball, where he immediately encounters the revolutionary Pierre Bezukhov and the soldier Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.

By the end of his first episode, Davies has got to the point that Pulman reached in week five, with all of the major characters introduced, including the alluring but foolish Natasha Rostova. All the adapters – from Vidor in the 50s to Davies now – give their scripts the basic structure of a triple family saga, focusing on the Bolkonsky and Rostov dynasties against the background of a fight over the will of the father who sired Pierre illegitimately, and the gathering romance between Andrei and Natasha.

‘The new War and Peace, with its posh women in bonnets, aptly echoes Pride and Prejudice.’ Photograph: BBC/Mitch Jenkins/Kaia Zak

Several early scenes in the new BBC version, with their posh women in bonnets or ball gowns in a big house, have a feel of Pride and Prejudice, which Davies famously adapted for the BBC in 1995. And, if such a connection is intended, it would not be absurd. Although Austen’s novel was published in 1811 and Tolstoy’s five decades later, both Pride and Prejudice and War and Peace begin around 1805. Davies, in an article about the drama, has made a specific comparison between Tolstoy’s Natasha and Austen’s Lizzie Bennet as rivals for the title of the most appealing heroine in literature.

On re-inspection, though, the earlier BBC adaptation also invoked the Bennet house in its depiction of St Petersburg high society, and this may be the logical outcome of an attempt to find an Anglophone parallel for the Russian aristocracy. One of the reasons the 1956 Hollywood version disappoints, when it doesn’t appal, is that the cast, including Fonda’s Pierre and Hepburn’s Natasha, remains entirely American in accent and manner. As a result, apart from a burst of cossack dancing, the atmosphere is more Ruritanian than Russian.

Significantly, Vidor’s film was completed before the Soviet occupation of Hungary. By the 1960s, with the polarities of the cold war more deeply frozen, there would perhaps not have been an appetite for three hours of Ruskie soldiers, even as mediated, via prep school and Princeton, by Mel Ferrer as Andrei. When, in 1965, one of the co-producers of the Hepburn War and Peace, Carlo Ponti, did adapt another Russian classic, it was Doctor Zhivago, which represented an act of anti-Soviet defiance as the Boris Pasternak novel was banned in the USSR.

Having experienced War and Peace in four different screen forms and once on radio, I am now in a position to divide the spoils. Both BBC 2016 and USSR 1966 benefit greatly from the use of Russian or near-Russian landscapes; they beat the woodenly artificial studio and sound-stage sets of BBC 1972 and Hollywood 1956.

Strikingly, all four Pierres – Anthony Hopkins then, and Paul Dano now for the BBC, Bondarchuk in his own film and Fonda for Vidor – wear wire-rimmed spectacles, suggesting that such frames have become universal shorthand for intellectual firebrands. It is unclear if Paterson Joseph wore them for his Radio 4 Pierre.

The visual quartet also features almost identical depictions of the death bed of Pierre’s father, Count Bezukhov, who uniformly breathes his last in a white nightcap, surrounded by the candles and chanting of the final sacrament of the Russian Orthodox church. Although, in this instance, as in many others, the Bondarchuk film is attractive for its presumably authentic detail of precisely which ointments and incantations would be used.

A legend from Pierre’s dissolute past – that he once tied a policeman to a bear – is recreated in flashback in the new television version and the Russian movie, but left as reported speech in the other two screen adaptations, probably for budgetary reasons. The different approaches to this moment, however, raise a recurrent dilemma with visual adaptations of literature. If someone says something happened, and then we see it, the event becomes reality, but, if they merely speak it, there is the possibility that the anecdote was invented.

A good example of this is that something mentioned in the novel as a rumour – an incestuous relationship between the siblings Anatole and Helene Kuragin – becomes flesh and sweat in the new BBC series, with brother and sister seen having sex, although this perhaps should not be surprising from an adapter who gave the world the famous Mr Darcy bathing scene.

But, pacy as well as racy, this latest attack on a finally unconquerable novel makes significant advances in the six-decade battle of between War and Peace adaptations.